[Martial33]

Well, I plug my camera in via FireWire but when I try to capture anything the first window just comes up with color bars and at the bottom of the window and says "no communication" where I assume there should be VTR controls.

If I just use "capture now" and push play on the camcorder, I get the second window popping up saying that it's capturing something but it actually doesn't.

There is just a black screen and there is no pitcure or time code running.

I had this problem with two cameras so far.

Last weekend in a rented an XL2 and after unplugging it from the front FireWire port and plugging in the back, I was able to capture and control the camera so at first I thought it was just the FireWire ports.

Since then I had to take that camera back and realize that some of the shots that I had captured became corrupted in some way because when I try to play them in their original form through QuickTime it says "error reading movie".

So now I went back to the original tapes to try to recapture the footage but this time on trying to do it on my own camcorder which is a Panasonic PD DVD 101 -- D.

It's just a consumer camera but I know it works because I recently made the switch from PC to Mac and I was able to control the camera with my previous editing software (Adobe Premiere Pro 2.0)

I tried changing the settings to generic but I still can't get Final Cut Pro to communicate with the camera.

Also it seems that when I put it into VTR mode I get that "spinning beach ball" that everyone talks about on the forums and it doesn't go away and till I come plug the camcorder or shut it off.

There's also a very faint but high pitched hum that appears to come from the computer.

I thought about changing the scratch disks -- that maybe it was a problem trying to record it to the external drive (which is RAIDed) but that's not the case either because although I tried changing the "scratch disk", there is still no communication with a camera so I don't think it matters where it would be saved to.

Also when I pulled the FireWire plug out of the machine, the machine shut off! (I was able to turn it back on again but that seems strange to me)

Any suggestions you have would be great.

[NitroNic]

This probalby won't help, but it'd be worth a shot. The school for which I am a Computer Support Technician has 3 PowerMac G5's with OS 10.3.9 that use Final cut EXPRESS, and we had some strange problems similar to yours. Here's one thing I did as a test.

I'm assuming you have an account with administrative privileges.

Create a new user account. Doesn't matter if it's an admin or standard account. Log in with this new account and see if you still get the same symptoms. In my case, the problem was totally resolved as long as I was logged in with the new account. If Final Cut Pro works liek Final Cut Express, the settings are user specific. I'm pretty sure the settings were somehow corrupted under the other account or something. If you still have the same symptoms while logged in as the new test user, then you can pretty much rule out the possibility of it being a user settings problem. Give it a try and tell us what happens.

Also if you need help creating a new user account, let me know or you can probalby do a quick search to figure it out.

Nic

[Martial33]

Nitro Nic

thanks for your reply. It sounds like a great solution.

..heres what I found out since then..

I began to point the finger at my camera.

Tried capturing footage from that camera to my PC as an acid test and that diden't work either.

So then I took the camera to a computer shop. They too plugged it in to several brand new machines and their machines would not recognize that there was a camera attached.

So then I called Panasonic who hooked me up with a service shop. The shop charged me 60.00 just to look at it, only to tell me that it would cost 600.00 to fix it.

(Brand new, it only cost 1000.00) but it still takes great ics but not I cant download the pics onto a computer (of any sort).

I was thinking of buying a cheep 300.00 camera just to be able to use the firewire from it but then I also want a quality camera which I cant afford right now to shoot weddings etc. So I was waiting for my next wedding gig to come up so I could rent another pro camera so I could also use it to download some other footage that I have to get on to the mac somehow.

Having said that, I don't know how to set up a new user account either. It could be that there are two forces at work here, corrupt user AND F'ed camera.